


He Has Buried You Before

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Body Horror, Death, Established Relationship, Hornet Stings, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Second person POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-12
Packaged: 2018-05-19 23:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5985106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He dreams too often of hornets, and the less he wants to the more inevitable it is that he’ll drag a swarm out of his head. You respect his desire to not bring about your death, and your own desire to not die, and you always make your way back to your own bed to lie sleepless and miserable and stare at the rafters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Has Buried You Before

**Author's Note:**

> If I tag 'hurt/comfort' and 'body horror' does a 'mood whiplash' tag implicitly add itself to this
> 
> Thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for catching all the typos and then repeating them mockingly. Her beta'ing is a gift.

There are only few things that irk you about dating Ronan Lynch. The fact that introducing him to your family is going to be an Incident; that he has possibly never washed those bracelets he keeps gnawing; that he insists on having a sex mix; that he put the murder squash song in the sex mix once and didn’t stop laughing even after you kicked him in the face; and worst of all, that you’re not able to sleep next to him.

He told you why - he dreams too often of hornets, and the less he _wants_ to the more inevitable it is that he’ll drag a swarm out of his head. You respect his desire to not bring about your death, and your own desire to not die, and you always make your way back to your own bed to lie sleepless and miserable and stare at the rafters.

It’s such a shallow gripe that it’s not worth entertaining, and yet you can’t help but note your own feelings; how you’d thought you’d get to move out of the openness of Monmouth’s main room, how you wonder what it would be like to fall asleep beside him, to share the deep and dreamy lull of a morning. It’s not something you can say aloud because who would be sympathetic for something so petty? It’s just another of your loved ones you can’t touch. Blue could kill you, Ronan could kill you. You asked Adam if he was planning to do you in, and he blanched so terribly that now you have to actually wonder.

There’s still plenty of Ronan that did not get more tolerable just because he started letting you kiss him, but you think it’s unfair to start harping on him now since you knew full-well what you were getting into. You see him on nights when he stays in, when he’s not out drinking or fighting or playing the kinds of games with Kavinsky that you’d rather not hear about. You prefer not to hear about Kavinsky in general, because Ronan might be content to be your dog but you have no wish to be his handler, and if you don’t hear what he’s up to then you don’t have to stop it. The disastrous rush of that night-time world does not intersect with your life where you can avoid it.

You can’t always avoid it.

It’s past two in the morning when someone slopes into Monmouth. For a moment you think it’s Adam, his features eclipsed by fresh bruises and torn skin, gritty and viciously red. You’re on your feet before you’re thinking, before you remember that Adam moved beyond his father’s reach, and that he’d never come to you in this state besides. Only Ronan’s proud enough not to care, and your vision of Adam disappears as Ronan shuts the door with his shoulder, wearing his new wounds easily. “Christ,” you say, crossing quickly to fuss at his side, “What happened to you?”

He mutters something that does not make sense.

“Car _surfing?_ ” you repeat, confused until you manage to picture it. You stare at him appalled. “Ronan, tell me you did not stand on top of a _moving car?_ ”

He shrugs, but you can tell that he’s pleased with himself. “It was fun until Kavinsky floored it.”

There’s a surge of anger in you at that name, a bitter little starburst that resents whatever appeal keeps drawing Ronan out and tempting him to hazardous sports. You swallow it down, burying it with all your other bad feelings, and try to focus on what’s in front of you instead; the darkening bruise over Ronan’s nose from when he soared down to the tarmac, the harsh scrapes from where his skin caught on uneven road and pulled him to a stop. There are black specks of asphalt studded through the injury, and you tell Ronan, “We need to actually clean this one.”

“If you insist,” he says, lack of resistance his agreement. Sometimes you hold out vague hope that he enjoys having you worry over him, but it’s the kind of thing he’ll never tell you so you won’t have the satisfaction of knowing. He lets you lead him down Cardboard Henrietta’s main street to the kitchen-bathroom-laundry, where you keep your medical supplies in the only clean cupboard.

Originally you just had a first-aid kid, but you live with Ronan and you know Adam sneaks in to take what he needs, so whenever you do your shopping you tend to scoop up a handful of whatever seems like it might be useful. You’re oversupplied on gauze and disinfectant, and also on things you found novel but never elect to actually use, spray-on bandaids and bandages for increasingly specific angles on fingers.

You take a very guilty pleasure in tending to Ronan. You’d rather he didn’t get hurt, but so long as he _is_ then it’s a chance for you to offer care that actually gets accepted. He doesn’t wince at the sting of disinfectant, or your attempts to be gentle as you clean scraps of the road out of his face. You run your fingers over his cheekbones, skirt the edge of the scrape, press lightly down on his nose to test the damage, stick a plaster over the worst of it and call it done. The plaster, you think, he only tolerates because you’re dating, and it will have ‘fallen off in the shower’ in under eight hours. For now it makes you feel like you’ve done a good job.

There’s something tranquil to mending, and it eases the insomnia that had you up in the first place. It’s nearly three by the time the two of you stagger into Ronan’s room. You don’t bother turning on the light, not with his arm draped over your shoulder and you trying blearily to remember what day of the week it is and if you’ll need to get up for school. You’ll find out when your alarm goes off, you decide, and fall into bed beside Ronan.

He curls around you, just a little, and you wonder if it’s some kind of apology for letting Kavinsky hurtle him off a car. You’ll get off the bed in a moment. You take Ronan’s face in your hands, feeling the rough grains of the bandage under your fingers, and he kisses you. He still smells of petrol and beer and antiseptic, but that’s not nearly as important as getting your glasses out of the way so you can kiss him back.

Chainsaw gives a quiet chitter from her corner of the room, and you wish it wasn’t three in the morning on what could quite possibly be a school day. Ronan’s arms around you are heavy and warm, impossible to shift. Usually he only indulges you like this when he’s sober, when it’s not three in the morning, when he can trust himself to stay awake around you. You can feel his exhaustion echoing yours.

You’ll get off the bed in a moment.

 

It feels like only a second has passed when you wake, but you know it’s been more than that. There’s a sense of wrongness stuck so deeply in your head that at first you can’t tell what’s causing it, just that you need to be awake _now_ and unknown flight instinct has banished all traces of sleep from you.

Ronan’s sitting upright, but otherwise the room is as still as it had been when you closed your eyes. The moonlight pushes shadows gently across the floor, the sheets are tousled over you, and Ronan’s easing himself out of bed, but you still don’t know why your heart is beating a wicked staccato, fear churning your gut.

And then you hear the buzz.

Your body knew the sound and remembered it faster than your hazy mind, but you catch up quickly, world snapping into focus as you grab for your glasses. Ronan hears the clatter, and tells you, “Go back to sleep,” but doesn’t turn to you at all. His eyes are on the floor on his side of the bed, trained on the source of the drone.

Sleep is impossibly far from your grasp. It’s a wonder you’re still breathing, the way your panic catches in your lungs. Death is a couple of wingbeats away, the bed’s only sheet is no real protection, and everything in you seems to tense as though bracing for impact. It takes a few attempts to push your glasses on with shaking fingers. You crawl slowly to Ronan’s side, as though the trick is to just not move quickly and that alone can save you.

You were expecting a hornet, maybe a hive if you were desperately unlucky. Instead, in the dark, it takes a very long moment for the shape on the floor to collapse into something you can understand. You’ve often imagined what you might have looked like dead and covered in stings. Now you’re staring at it.

It’s unmistakeably you, glasses cracked and face warped by horror. Every inch of your skin bears a sting, a sick puckered mark , raised and warped and wrong. There’s a phobia, a very distant part of you thinks, of little holes lining flesh, of how unnatural and diseased they mark the bearer. Your corpse embodies it.

You shut down. The grotesque mirror at Ronan’s feet is beyond your comprehension, every pitted stretch of skin an image you’ll have to push from your mind when you face your own reflection. There’s a primal urge in you to get away from the body lest more hornets come swarming out of the holes, but your limbs are locked into place, keeping you exactly as still as your doppelganger. He’s you down to the bruise on your knee from your last trip through the caves. Bile rises in your throat in a queasy  rush that you barely manage to swallow back.

You see the source of the buzzing at last; a single wasp still clings to your corpse, crawling beneath your glasses on your still-open eye. You regard it with a dead kind of curiosity, wondering if you should be grateful there’s only one or distraught that there’s anything in front of you at all. You’re not capable of anything other than staring, wires in your mind attempting to connect and form more useful actions but sparking weakly into nothing.

Ronan’s flicks your corpse’s glasses down its face, exposing the wasp, and you wonder vaguely if he’s going to crush it on top of the body, if his pragmatism extends this far. No need to respect the dead version of you when it’s not real. It looks terribly real. The wasp crawls over your corpse’s lips as you watch with detached repulsion, and Ronan manages to catch it in a bottle, covering the end with one hand while he carries it to his window. He hurtles the whole bottle outside, contents as deadly to you as any Molotov, and after the smash there is absolute silence.

He doesn’t look at you. “You’re not meant to sleep in here.”

“Sorry,” you tell him. You’re watching the fingers of your corpse, shadows making it seem like they twitch. You really are sorry. When the hornet left, air and regret returned to flood you and now you’re drowning in them, palpitating heart demanding attention alongside your dizzying wave of guilt. “Really, Ronan I –“ you’d just wanted to, so much. Still do. “This will never happen again.”

He nods stiffly and turns back to you at last, expression totally unreadable. His clock tells you he’s gotten barely an hour’s sleep, but he shoves his feet back into his boots, glaring dully at your double.

You have to ask. “You dreamed of me dead?”

He gives you a look that you don’t have the faculties to interpret, and then he’s hauling your corpse over his shoulder and heading out, letting the door slam and rattle as he leaves.

You haven’t moved since you first saw your body, and you don’t until you hear the BMW pulling away from Monmouth. You’re running on an hour’s miserable sleep, head swimming with exhaustion and conflicting feelings that you don’t have the energy to mediate for. Even after everything, the temptation to sink back into the warmth of Ronan’s bed is near overwhelming.

But you can’t do that to him. You drag yourself out of his room to your cold bed, and you feel like you’ve been up for a week straight, but actual sleep eludes you still. You stare unfocused at your model of Henrietta until you’re asleep without realising, and in your dreams the model is a prosperous, bustling city of wasps. At least they stay locked in your head.

 

You’re wretched the next morning, but Ronan must be worse. You never heard him come home, though his door’s still shut when you drag yourself upright. It turns out to be a Thursday and you spend your shower debating the relative merits of letting him sleep in and forcing him to school. Long Term Goals win out over He Was Up Late Saving Your Life, and you bang on his door like you usually do when he sleeps in too late. He rises eventually, scowl in place and dark shadows under his eyes doing everything possible to shame you, but he still goes to shower.

You think maybe neither of you will ever need to mention it, so long as you don’t repeat it.

You think maybe he resents having to bury you.

You wish it wasn’t taking you so long to learn the very simple lesson that you cannot have what you want. Noah is not the only one of your friends that can evaporate right when you need him. You’re almost considering letting Ronan drive you to school in the Camaro when he re-emerges, looking dressed and bored and like he wasn’t up late digging a grave. The only thing out of place on him is the plain bandage over his cheek, a startling concession to you that you scramble to find a response to.

He slings an arm over your shoulders, and you think you might be shaking with gratitude, but you do your best to respond in kind, put your arm around his waist and let an easy smile take over your features. If he’s giving you the gift of pretending it never happened, then you won’t waste it; you will be grateful for the things in your grasp, you can stay by his side for your waking hours, and stop tempting fate with your shaky sense of self-preservation. This is absolutely enough for you.


End file.
